The Registration Act, 1908

§18 — Documents of which registration is optional

Any of the following documents may be registered under this Act, namely:— (a) Instruments (other than instruments of gift and wills) which purport or operate to create, declare, assign, limit or extinguish, whether in present or in future, any right, title or interest, whether vested or contingent, of a value less then one hundred rupees, to or in immovable property; (b) instruments acknowledging the receipt or payment of any consideration on account of the creation, declaration, assignment, limitation or extinction of any such right, title or interest; (c) leases of immovable property for any term not exceeding one year, and leases exempted under section 17; [(cc) instruments transferring or assigning any decree or order of a Court or any award when such decree or order or award purports or operates to create, declare, assign, limit or extinguish, whether in present or in future, any right, title or interest, whether vested or contingent, of a value less than one hundred rupees, to or in immovable property;] (d) instruments (other than wills) which purport or operate to create, declare, assign, limit or extinguish any right, title or interest to or in movable property; (e) wills; and (f) all other documents not required by section 17 to be registered.

State amendments

This section has been amended in its application to Himachal Pradesh, Tripura and Uttar Pradesh. The text above is the central provision and is what applies everywhere else — these amendments are law only in the State that made them.

Himachal Pradesh[Vide Himachal Pradesh Act 2 of 1969, s. 3]Read →Hide
Himachal Pradesh 3. Insertion of new section 18A.- In the Indian Registration Act, 1908 (16 of 1908) (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), after section 18, the following section shall be inserted, namely; “18-A. Documents for registration to be accompanied by a true copy.- Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act, the registering officer shall refuse to register any document presented to him for registration unless such document is accompanied by a true copy thereof.”
Tripura[Vide Tripura Act 7 of 1982, s. 2]Read →Hide
Tripura Insertion of new section 18A.—In the Registration Act, 1908 (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), after section 18, the following section shall be inserted, namely:- 18A. Document for Registration to be accompanied by a true copy.—(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in the Act, the Registering Officer shall refuse to register any document presented to him for registration unless such document is accompanied by a true copy thereof. (2) The true copy referred to in Sub-section (1) shall be neatly hand-written or printed or type- written or lithographed or otherwise prepared in such manner as may be prescribed.
Uttar Pradesh[Vide Uttar Pradesh Act 14 of 1971, s. 2]Read →Hide
Uttar Pradesh Insertion of a new section 18-A in Act XVI of 1908.—In the Registration Act, 1908 (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), after section 18, the following section shall be inserted, namely :— 18A. Documents for registration to be accompanied by a true copy thereof.—(1) The Registering Officer shall refuse to register any document presented to him for registration unless such document is accompanied by a true copy thereof, and in the case of a document referred to in section 19, also by a true copy of the translation referred to therein. (2) A copy referred to in sub-section (1) shall not be a carbon copy, and shall be neatly handwritten, printed or type written, or be a cyclostyled copy of type-written matter, on only one side of the paper, and shall be prepared in accordance with such rules, if any, as may be made in that behalf, and shall contain a declaration in the prescribed manner that the same is a true copy of the document or of the translation, as the case may be."]

Reproduced from the same official PDF as the section above, as the amending Act words it — not a consolidated State version of the section. Check the source before relying on it.

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Source & version

Official text: India Code (official) ↗

Official India Code text: The Registration Act, 1908 (16 of 1908), English PDF (bitstream 123456789/2190/5/A1908-16.pdf, 721,071 bytes, sha256 95b81008f2d529cf...) fetched directly from indiacode.nic.in (Akamai edge, DNS via dns.google) on 2026-08-01. Extracted via pdftotext 26.07 -bbox and the @nexlex/ingest inline parser. This Act carries the heaviest State amendment apparatus in the corpus — 44 regions and 154 cited blocks, several States stacked under a single banner — all of which is skipped rather than presented as central law (D-052). The published section set is the Act's own arrangement of sections exactly: 1-93 plus 16A, 23A and 32A, 96 in all. Automated parse; footnotes and amendment history excluded. Spot-verified against the PDF; full clause-level proofread pending.

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